Getting there is half the battle or so the saying goes. Regardless of how your year has gone – and I hope it has been your best year ever – all that matters now is that Thanksgiving is upon us.

No Thanksgiving worries here, Sandy is a constant companion to turkeys on our farm. 

The uniqueness of this holiday, which finds us surrounded by friends and family, is that it offers a great opportunity to reflect, reset and refocus our energy; to close out the year purposefully and decisively.

I am thankful to be a part of UMass Memorial Health Care and proud to work alongside each of you to make our health care system the best place to give care and the best place to get care. Our focus remains our patients. Let’s continue to put them at the center of all we do.

We implemented more than 13,000 of your ideas this year all of which helped us to improve the patient experience. There is still work to be done for sure, but I am thankful for your commitment to our patients and to our idea system. It has had a major impact on our organization.

On behalf of the leadership of UMass Memorial Health Care, I wish you a very Happy Thanksgiving!

e-Visit performing as expected                                                          

In October we launched e-Visit, a new virtual care platform for care of minor medical issues in the comfort of home.  The service is being piloted for free to our employees and their dependents who get their health plan through UMass Memorial Health Care and who have a UMass Memorial Medical Group physician.  As expected this pilot program has worked well and the response has been very positive. e-Visits that occur between 7 am and 10 pm are responded to within an hour; after hours requests are prioritized for the next morning.

It is a winning proposition, especially for patients who are on the fence about whether to seek urgent care or visit an emergency room. Once you have accessed the system a physician will tell you if you need to be seen in-person or they can prescribe medicine for you which can be picked up at the pharmacy of your choice. e-Visit is a great alternative treatment option that we hope moves beyond the pilot stage and is made more widely available in the future. Visit www.umassmemorial.org/evisit for more details.

Thanks for all your great ideas and for taking great care of our patients and one another,

Eric